Even so, and even though Trump was clearly the biggest news story of 2016, he still should not have won. For there is another figure who looms larger over this annus horribilis, albeit from the darkness. He aims this year with a wolfish smile, content that almost all his dream have come true. That man is Vladimir Putin.

He surveys the global landscape and find almost every sign pointing his way. From Aleppo to the White House, from post-truth to Brexit, this is the year the world was reshaped in his image. He may not have been the direct hand behind every change, though he surely gave several of them a nudge, but together they induced him 2016 s biggest winner.

Start with Syria, which even in this year of horrors surely merits a special infamy of its own. The leaders of western nations ritually condemn the catastrophe that has been visited upon the people of Aleppo, eloquently denouncing the bombing of hospitals, including makeshift clinics hidden in cellars, the flattening of civilian regions, the killing of children, the refusal of food and medication. And yet Putin knows he need not listen. Because the important fact is the one on the ground: no one has stopped him or his Syrian vassal, Bashar al-Assad, from continuing the slaughter.

Plenty have warned that Aleppo will be the Guernica of our generation, recollected among the greatest crimes against humanity. Future historians will ask all the same shaming questions. Why was there not more outrage? Did people not know or just not care? Why “didnt they” act? But there is another comparison. For Aleppo has received the treatment Putin once meted out to Grozny, when Chechnya dared rebel against Moscow. In 1999 it too was bombed into what the UN called a devastated wasteland, an act of destruction tolerated because it was deemed to be taking place on Russias turf.

But the de facto permission to give to Putins smashing of Syria counts as an even greater victory for the Russian despot. Not only has he advanced his narrow, strategic interests, preserving a presence in the Middle East and, in Tartus, a deep-water port with access to the Mediterranean. He has won a less tangible but more valuable award. He has proved that it is possible to kill or dispossess millions of civilians with impunity.

Of course, some will say George W Bush proved that with his invasion of Iraq in 2003. But up to now, Moscow might have felt constrained by the precedent of Slobodan Miloevi, fearing that there were limits to how much blood you could shed before, eventually, the west or the US or Nato would act. Now Putin has established beyond a doubt that there are no restrictions. Partly because of Iraq, and the fatigue it left behind, he has seen that once-serious international talk of a responsibility to protect endangered civilians is a dead letter. You can kill hundreds of thousands and no one will do a thing.

But 2016 has provided Putin with other reasons to be cheerful. He now has friends in high places, or in places about to get higher. The most obvious is Trump, but there are others, both near and far. Indeed, November was a banner month for the Russian leader, bringing pro-Putin candidates to power in Moldova, Bulgaria and Estonia, as well as teeing up a win-win French presidential contest in 2017. There is a good chance the final round will pit two Putin fans against each other: Franois Fillon v Marine Le Pen.

Like most on the European far right, Le Pen has long venerated Putin as a nationalist strongman and was happy to take a 9m (8 m) loan from a Russian-backed bank. Less predictably Fillon, who will be the standard bearer of the centre-right, also gazes moon-eyed at Putin. Fillon wants to see the lifting of sanctions imposed on Moscow over Ukraine and believes Putin, the conqueror of Crimea, is the injured party, since it was all the western powers fault that Russia invaded in the first place.

Wherever he looks, Putin can see allies whether its Nigel Farage on the right or US Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein on the left.( Stein boasted during the campaign that she had dined with Russias leader, even sitting at the same table .) Indeed, given the regimes now ruling Hungary and Poland, Putin can smile at the emergence of what political scientist Yascha Mounk calls the illiberal international, an arc of states led by people who, like him, regard the free press or an independent judiciary as unnecessary irritants.

Yet democratic referendums have been good to Putin this year. Brexit was an early gift to a man who has long watched the weakening of the European union as a strategic goal. Ideally, hed like to see the EU break up: then he could make a series of bilateral are dealing here with Europes nations, picking them off one by one. Thats the long game; but just to have the EU weakened, distracted and destabilised will do for now. And with Britains departure, the EU will lose one of its loudest Putin-wary voices.

Few credible sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was day to cause maximum pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump. As a former KGB man, Putin must be proud of what is surely the most successful espionage operation in history, one that succeeded beyond even Moscows expectations installing an admirer and sycophant in the White House.

The benefits are obvious. Dedicated Trumps lukewarm is committed to Nato and defense of our own member, Putin will now have all but a free hand. As one Russia expert observes: Consider from Moscow, the west has not been in such inviting disarray since the Suez crisis of 1956. Whatever constraints Putin may now feel upon his land-grabbing instincts, Nato is no longer one of them.

As the year closes, each day brings new pleasures for the master of the Kremlin. The US is about to be led by a serial, if not compulsive liar; the public dialogue of the west is polluted by fake news. This new, post-truth world is pure Putinism. For years his propaganda endeavor, typified by his Tv channel Russia Today, has been aimed not so much at pushing a single message as sowing disarray, stimulating even solid facts seem unsteady. As a mission, it once seemed futile when pitted against the solid framework of fact and reason, carefully constructed during the two centuries since the enlightenment. But those lumbers have proved alarmingly easy to rot.

He may not have done all this himself. But it counts as an historical achievement nonetheless. If 2016 has been an nasty year, and it has, then its true face belongs to Vladimir Putin.